Thoughts and reviews. Just later.

The Honeymoon Phase: Call of Duty WWII

Every game (unless it is horrendously awful) has a honeymoon phase. It usually lasts a few weeks to a month. It is the period of time in which you feel like it is the perfect game, any other contenders need not apply, and anything that came before it was a blemish on the franchise. Which brings me to the latest Call of Duty release; WWII.

I’m sure you have all seen this meme image of the “Call of Duty Cycle”. Unfortunately, we didn’t even make it to December before the problems started hitting us fast and furiously, let alone January. Earlier in the year, I wrote about how excited I was for this game. But at the end of that post, I asked a few questions. All have disappointing answers. Let’s begin.

1, 2 and 3.) Will supply drops be in this game? What will that content be like? Crazy skins, weapons, taunts, and immersion-breaking character customization?

Yes. Supply drops are in this game. Not a big surprise, sure, but still a little disappointing. There are no weapon skins. There are, however, copy and paste taunts, pistol grips which nobody, including yourself, can see when equipped, and costumes for your character. Oh, and of course, hundreds of calling cards. Most animated, which is another shame, because animated calling cards used to be special. Now if everyone has one, and everyone can get one easily, they aren’t special anymore.

The supply drop system in this game is similar to the one in Modern Warfare Remastered. Collections, a currency which you can collect and then use to unlock what you want, and COD Points.

4.)Is a season pass, if it follows the standard formula of 4 DLC map packs, really necessary in this age of gaming, where the best idea is to not split people up with multiple paywalls?

Sadly, even though a season pass isn’t necessary, one is included. Another four DLC packs will be released, as usual, and this time they will only include 3 MP maps, 1 War map, and 1 Zombies map. Plus, there is the season pass only map, Carentan, which further splits the population up.

And I think the map situation is the perfect place to start reeling off the laundry list of problems this game has. If you do not have the season pass, at launch, you will only have 9 MP maps to play on. And don’t buy into the people who say “oh there are actually 12, because War is multiplayer”. Sure. War is a multiplayer mode. But I can only play 3 maps in that mode. Likewise, I can only play 9 maps in the other multiplayer modes. One of which, Gustav Cannon, has to be the worst map I have ever played in a Call of Duty game, and I’ve played them all. If you aren’t a sniper, you will be picked apart on this map. The other maps are mostly weird and poorly designed. There are a few gems though, like London Docks, Flak Tower, and Sainte Marie du Mont.

Next, we have the server issues which plagued this game for the first two weeks. I don’t even know where to begin with this. Sometimes you wouldn’t load into a game until 10 seconds after everyone else, sometimes the lobby would die after the game concluded, thus not counting a win towards your daily/weekly challenges, and sometimes, even in a perfectly good lobby, it would begin searching for another one immediately upon the conclusion of the last match, giving you zero time to edit classes, or even back out.

The other egregious thing I would like to dedicate a couple of sentences to is the current XP system. According to Michael Condrey, double XP was accidentally enabled from the moment the game launched, and this past weekend, instead of double XP being turned on, triple XP was enabled. Now that XP gain is back to “normal”, leveling up is tedious. It’s honestly worse than a Battlefield game.

All in all, this whole thing is really just a shame. The gameplay itself is smooth. Boots on the ground action has indeed returned, but everything surrounding it is one ding after another. From typos, to near impossible contracts, to some challenges not being tracked properly, on and on the list goes.

It’s very rare that I already begin to look forward to the next Call of Duty before the current one is even three weeks old, but that is where I’m at. I feel like I say this every time their turn comes up, but I hope Treyarch can deliver a competent experience at the end of 2018. They haven’t let me down before. I hope they don’t plan on starting now.

(as an aside, I have not played the campaign yet, or dabbled in enough zombies to give an opinion on those, although I still am planning on doing both, and I will probably make another post giving my thoughts on those when complete)